Politics of Bob Dylan

Digital Collections @ Dordt Faculty Work Comprehensive List 3-14-2015 Politics of Bob Dylan Jeff Taylor Dordt College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcollections.dordt.edu/faculty_work Part of the American Popular Culture Commons, and the Christianity Commons Recommended Citation Taylor, J. (2015). Politics of Bob Dylan. Retrieved from https://digitalcollections.dordt.edu/faculty_work/ 203 This Conference Presentation is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Collections @ Dordt. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Work Comprehensive List by an authorized administrator of Digital Collections @ Dordt. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Politics of Bob Dylan Abstract Bob Dylan’s political worldview has remained essentially the same over six different decades and numerous private and public transformations. Whether he appeared as a New Left protest icon, rock music and Counterculture innovator, rural family man, Christian associated with the Jesus People, or cantankerous social critic distrustful of worldly leaders, Dylan’s notions of freedom and justice, power and sin, have tied all of these roles together. Keywords Bob Dylan, popular culture, politics, freedom, justice, power, sin Disciplines American Popular Culture | Christianity Comments Paper presented at the Ciceronian Society 2015 Annual Conference held on the campus of Mount Saint. Mary's University in Emmitsburg, Maryland, March 12-14, 2015. This paper is adapted from the new Palgrave Macmillan book The Political World of Bob Dylan: Freedom and Justice, Power and Sin by Jeff Taylor and Chad Israelson. © 2015. All rights reserved. This conference presentation is available at Digital Collections @ Dordt: https://digitalcollections.dordt.edu/ faculty_work/203 Meeting of the Ciceronian Society – March 14, 2015 The Politics of Bob Dylan by Jeff Taylor (and Chad Israelson) According to Bob Dylan, we live in what his 1989 song calls a “Political World.” He is correct. But what does this mean? And what is Dylan’s relation to this world? The political themes most commonly appearing in Dylan’s work are freedom, suspicion of power, belief in universal sacred truths, and justice for the vulnerable. He understands that to be free is to be empowered and the downtrodden enjoy very little of either. Power is at the heart of politics and Dylan distrusts both the exertion of power and the ability of human beings to utilize it to correct the wrongs of society. In an oversimplified nutshell, we could say that Bob Dylan’s political philosophy since 1979 has been that of Woody Guthrie supplemented by the gospels of the New Testament, of C. Wright Mills supplemented by the prophet Isaiah, of Merchants of Death supplemented by the book of Revelation. This being the case, ideology and theology are naturally intertwined. Dylan’s Roots and Traditional World From a purely statistical standpoint, Bob Dylan—Jewish and hailing from Minnesota’s Iron Range—should reliably vote Democratic. Loath to have labels 1 put upon him, his political outlook cannot be reduced to statistics. Dylan’s political world has proved too broad and independent to be classified simply as left or right, conservative or liberal, though he has often been assumed to be decidedly leftist. His political outlook is partly derived from the atmosphere of his home state and partly from his religious upbringing. Placed into those two cultures by birth, Dylan melded what he learned from them with traditional American ideals and roots music. His appreciation for the ideals of an America rooted in the past, a powerful sense of the sacred, and identification with the underdog coalesced into a belief system that transcended contemporary politics. This combination intermingled in the fertile and artistic mind of a sensitive young man and reappeared consistently over the years. Beyond his own Hebraic culture, Bob Dylan is indebted to several musical traditions with deep roots in America: Anglo-Celtic folk; popular, old-time country; and Delta blues. One of the salutary cultural contributions of the South has been its preservation of English, Scottish, and Irish traditional and popular ballads that were brought from the British Isles to colonial America. Settlers in the Shenandoah Valley, Appalachia, and Ozarks were largely responsible for passing these songs on to later generations, thereby serving as the foundation for early folk music and country music.1 2 The South also produced the African-American genre of Delta blues, coming out of slavery and spirituals. Dylan has been an important transmitter of these largely-lost traditions in an era of trendy, commercial entertainment. This is surprising because Dylan has neither Anglo-Celtic nor African heritage and is just a third-generation American with all four of his grandparents having been born in the Russian Empire. Dylan’s reliance on folk and blues music has sociopolitical implications. It is liberal because it recognizes the value of the common people, of the poor and powerless, of the despised and discriminated-against. It is conservative because it recognizes the value of tradition, of the old and spiritual, of the familiar and time- tested. Voice of a Generation Though he has shared certain characteristics with conservatives and traditionalists, Bob Dylan’s “Voice of a Generation” title came from his contributions to causes associated with the New Left. Over a long and remarkable career, Dylan expressed populist, traditionalist, and egalitarian beliefs. What Dylan called the “finger-pointin’” songs from his early 1960s folk style, fostered an image that he was a protest singer. His artistic output during this period dovetailed with the emergence of a group of politically active young people often called the New Left. This convergence gave added potency to his civil rights, anti- 3 war, and other social justice-minded anthems and created an impression of a synchronistic mass movement that drafted Dylan to be its musical spokesman. Throughout the years, Dylan evolved as an artist, though many wanted what was not possible. Those who expected him to return to a lost era did not grapple with the question of how long Dylan could write the same type of song before people stopped listening. Had he remained the darling of the New Left by writing topical songs, he would have been relegated to a hopelessly dated niche market. During the years following World War II, the notion of freedom in America manifested itself in a myriad of new ways. There were Freedom Schools, a Freedom Summer, Free Speech Movement, free love, free markets, and Young Americans for Freedom. To some, particularly those on the Left, freedom was a legal concept being denied to minority groups who sought equality within an oppressive society. It also existed as an abstract ideal pursued by those who felt shackled spiritually or intellectually. In June 1963, the New Left group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) approved the essay “America and New Era,” which stated bluntly that their “hope is human freedom.”2 Dylan exemplified both types of freedom in the 1960s. Conversion and Culture It is important to consider the authenticity of Bob Dylan’s Christian conversion and on-going faith in Christ. If we are going to describe Dylan as an 4 example of Christian anarchism since 1978, we have to show two things: that he remains a Christian and that he is an anarchist. His anarchism—before and after 1978—is easily established, but a brief flirtation with Christianity in 1979-81 does not a Christian anarchist make . at least not when speaking of Dylan in the present tense. So it is important to verify his continued Christianity. In the two-year period between the release of Shot of Love (1981) and Infidels (1983), two contradictory rumors suggested that Dylan’s “Christian phase” was over. He had either lost interest in religion and returned to his worldly lifestyle of drinking and carousing, or he had embraced Orthodox Judaism as an alternative to Christianity. No doubt Dylan’s personal life was not above criticism from a moral perspective—as is true for all of us—but that says little about his faith commitment or his status in relation to the grace of God. As for a return to his Jewish roots, this perception was sparked by events such as attending the bar mitzvahs of his sons and studying with some rabbis in Brooklyn. But this proved nothing. Dylan did not reject his Jewishness when he knelt before Yeshua, whom he saw as the Jewish Messiah.3 From a spiritual point of view, Dylan did not see Christianity as a rejection or replacement of his Jewishness. He saw it as a completion or fulfillment. In 1984, Dylan told Rolling Stone that the Old Testament and New Testament were “equally valid” to him. He also said, “I believe in the Book of 5 Revelation,” and went on to refer to the coming Antichrist. Twenty-eight years later, he repeated the line about Revelation word-for-word to a different interviewer for the same magazine.4 During his 1986 world tour, Dylan introduced the song “In the Garden,” from the album Saved, by saying, “I want to sing you a song about my hero.” This was not the act of an Orthodox Jew since the song is all about Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Dylan sang both the black spiritual “Go Down, Moses” and his own “In the Garden”—upholding both the Old and New Testaments—when he performed in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1987.5 Dylan the Christian: A Passing Phase? Like a submarine, Dylan’s faith has been mostly submerged since 1981. This does not mean that it has disappeared. Dylan’s concert set lists (including his choice of cover songs), his cagey-yet-illuminating interview remarks, and his use of biblical language, including New Testament words, in his songs all attest to his continued Christianity.6 In addition to evidence cited above, in connection with the Judaism rumors, there are many things that can be mentioned from 1983 through 2015.

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